


Assorted Disco Elysium drabbles

by RuBecSo



Category: Disco Elysium (Video Game)
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Disordered Eating, Drabbles, Drug Abuse, Drug Use, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Self-Destruction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:34:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 30
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28529292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuBecSo/pseuds/RuBecSo
Comments: 38
Kudos: 36





	1. "Belong"

“My head. It don’t belong to me. I just live in it.”

He’s smiling, but Jean’s known him long enough to know that doesn’t mean jack shit. With Harry, it’s all about the eyes. But he’s not looking at him. He’s staring down at the streetlight reflected in a puddle. 

Jean lets the words play back in his mind like a tape deck. Dissecting them like he’s listening to a suspect, not a friend. Searching for some shimmer of irony hidden in his tone. Something that would let him take it as a joke and move on.

He finds nothing.


	2. "Recycled Tragedy"

“Thoughts?”

Harry closes his eyes. Opens them again. Lets the past reveal itself in the scars it left. 

The overturned chair. The window, smashed from outside. The door frame, warped with damp. The square of wall untouched by nicotine stains, a framed photograph recently removed. Brickwork visible beneath flaking plaster, blackened by soot. 

A bullet hole. A miniature blast crater, like the ones in the road outside. The oldest scar in the room. Not relevant. Except in that way that everything is.

"Are we nothing more than a recycled tragedy?"

The lieutenant sighs. 

“Detective? The crime scene?”

Ah. Too poetic.


	3. "Soothe"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt was "Soothe", though it occurs to me that the soothing in this fic doesn't come until the end. Ah well, no Hurt/Comfort without the Hurt :P

They come to him through the static of painkillers. Images, sensations, ( _memories?_ ). Remnants of dreams, shot to bits and stitched together. The deepest parts of him want to let go, be soothed by the swallowing dark. 

But he reaches out. ( _Can’t help it._ )

A decaying disco beat. Cigarette smoke rising from a balcony. The smell of apricots…

( _No… take me back!_ )

Pain drags him to the surface. His leg screams at him, but still he thrashes, grasping for something solid…

“Stay still, detective.”

The voice has a hand. He clutches at it and does not let it go.

“It’s okay.”


	4. "Tease"

Kim likes to think he’s good at resisting petty urges. Keeping his inner self and outer self sovereign, becoming an implacable wall of professionalism. 

Yet watching his partner gaze back and sigh as the witness disappears into his apartment, it’s taking every drop of self control Kim has not to tease him.

It was hard enough during the questioning itself. Trying to work out what he’d missed that was making his superior officer stammer and fidget like that. Realising what was happening. Realising Harry  _ hadn’t _ realised it.

_ We all start somewhere _ , he reminds himself.  _ Some of us later than others. _


	5. "Heroic"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kind of a companion piece to "Soothe"

When Garte embarked on the heroic task of cleaning the hotel room, Kim initially insisted on helping. Eventually, he was forced to accept that his concussion made him more nuisance than help. So he sat with his eyes closed, while Garte cleaned around him and the semi-conscious officer on the sofa-bed.

Of the three of them, Harry was the most talkative. Groans and curses when the painkillers wore off, mumbled nonsense and sentence fragments when they kicked in. 

Once he jerked awake, eyes wide and gleaming.

“Don’t send me back,” he whispered, “She’s waiting for me down there.”


	6. "Seduce"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Drug use

He leaned over her and watched as she crushed up the Preptide pills with the bottom of an empty bottle and separated it into lines. 

She looked up. “What?”

He smiled, though his scar stretched it into a smirk.

“Didn’t think anyone carried pharma-grade in this shithole.”

Klaasje laughed, a shrill, involuntary sound. It rang in her ears, over the rush of blood. 

“Is that your way of asking what a nice girl like me’s doing in a place like this?”

She’d give him this: being complimented for her taste in stimulants was a novel way of being seduced.


	7. "Glimmer"

SAVOIRE FAIRE: Her jumpsuit. It’s wrong. 

YOU: Wrong on her?

SAVOIR FAIRE: No. It’s perfect on her. It might as well have grown out of her.

INLAND EMPIRE: Thin, cold sunlight, forced through smothering clouds. A sea split into a thousand silver glimmers blurs into grey, meaningless static

YOU: It’s the light.

SAVOIR FAIRE: Yes. Those sequins are meant to catch the lights of a disco ball.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Ooh yeah, baby. Sparkles in your eyes, disco in your ears, sweat on your skin. Ask her if she wants to party.

YOU: It’s in the wrong place.

EMPATHY: So is she.


	8. "Apple Seeds"

“Look.” Harry gestured to the corpse’s flushed cheeks. “She’s blushing.”

Kim’s eyes flicked up from his notes and back.

“Mm. Red hypostasis. Suggests carbon monoxide poisoning.”

Harry leaned in close, brows furrowed.

( _Here we go. The wild leap._ )

“Could be cyanide.”

Kim set down his pen.

“Detective. We are not in a Dick Mullen novel. There are no cyanide poisoning cases in Revachol.”

Harry was quiet for a few moments. 

( _And now the obscure trivia._ )

“’41. A man died from eating apple seeds.”

Kim pinched his nose and sighed.

“Okay. There has been _one_ case of cyanide poisoning in Revachol.”


	9. "The world is always ending"

The world was always ending. Lives cut off before their time, or too long after. Their city, starving on the doorstep of the world economy. Love crumbling like so much cheap mortar.

Some said the world had ended in the forties, with the boom years. Or when the revolution was crushed. Or the monarchy overthrown. For Harry, it was when Dora left. Jean believed him when he said it.

But how did the words go? “ _Après la vie - le mort. Après le mort - la vie de nouveau._ _”_

Not a better life, but life nonetheless.

Somehow Harry could never accept that.


	10. "Relentless"

“I never give up. I’m relentless, baby.”

He said it with that grin of his, full of the impossible confidence needed to pull off a line like that. Like a sports star on a billboard. Hell, that might have been where he got that line.

Back then it was a promise, that he’d never stop fighting. For her, for the city, for the whole world when he was feeling grandiose (and oh how grandiose suited him, once).

Those words come back to her, over the years. More and more, they sound less like a promise and more like a threat.


	11. "Bad Day"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Self-destructive patterns, implied addiction

_He'd had a bad day and just needed something to make him feel better._

That was the mantra. Whether said out loud or (as the list of people who’d listen dwindled) only to himself, that was Harry’s trusty lullaby for his conscience. 

_He couldn’t be blamed. Everyone had bad days._

Trouble was, days stretched into weeks. Months. Years. All the while telling himself he’d start afresh soon, clean himself up, look to the future, but _just for now…_

Until the song grew so familiar, it was easier to find more bad days than to find a new tune to hum.


	12. "Open"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: Alcohol abuse/addiction

Between locating the freezer and lugging the body down to it (plus time lost pausing to retch), it was 22:55 by the time Lieutenant Kim bid him goodnight. The Frittte was open until 23:00. 

Harry’s heart was pounding and his hands shook as he counted out loose coins. He smiled at the clerk, sweaty and apologetic. She remained transcendentally apathetic.

He gulped down half the bottle of Commodore Red on his walk back and forced down the rest of the sickly, cheap wine in his room. The warmth in his belly was almost enough to ignore the cold wind blowing through the broken window.


	13. "Door" - pt. 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Leads directly on from "Open". I'll compile these into a separate fic when I'm done but I'll post them here piece-by-piece for now.)

The sounds of Martinaise blew in too. The foul-mouthed stream of consciousness of those two drugged-out delinquents round the back of the hotel. An argument breaking out between two truckers stuck in the endless jam. A grunt and tinkle of broken glass as someone went clattering down the steps.

(Further away, Satellite-Officer Vicquemare’s head snapped up, thinking he heard a knock on his door. It was just the old latch, rattling in the wind.)

And closer, right above Harry, heels clicking on the rooftop. Klaasje was awake too.

A thought appeared in his mind and stuck. _Knock on her door._


	14. "Door" pt. 2

“Evening, Officer.” She leaned against the door frame, cigarette in her hand.

“Evening.” 

“It’s late.”

“I had some — more questions.” He spoke in stops and starts, dragging each word from the swamp of his brain. “Thought — I’d ask them. Now.”

Her gaze drifted lazily to the room next-door.

“Now that your partner is asleep?”

“Yeah. That.”

She looked at him for a long few seconds. Harry felt her eyes slide across his bloated face, his wine-stained lips, before meeting his own.

( _‘That’s not really why you’re here, is it?’_ )

( _‘No.’_ )

She shrugged. “Sure. Come in.”


	15. "Method"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Leads on from the previous three :)

“So,” said Klaasje, levering the cap off a bottle of Pilsners, “do you usually party with suspects?”

Harry didn’t know. But he didn’t want to say that. Instead he said the next thing that bubbled up:

“It’s my secret method.”

She gave him one of those sidelong looks.

“Is it secret if you tell me that?”

“Aha,” he replied, tapping his swollen nose, “that’s all part of it.”

“Of course,” she drawled.

They lapsed into silence. By habit, Harry turned the last few sentences over in his mind. Something caught his eye.

“Are you?” he asked.

“Am I what?”

“A suspect.”


	16. "Preservation"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of the previous scene but not following directly on from it. When I collate these into one fic I'll probably insert it somewhere in the middle of the dialogue.

They sat side-by-side on the bed. Klaasje's knees were tucked up against her chest; his didn’t bend that far. Their backs leaned against the wall. Some part of Harry had known that was important, that he mustn’t turn his back on the staircase, the window, the door. Some orphaned sense of self-preservation, lingering without memory to anchor it.

(Did Klaasje know it too? Perhaps she just preferred not to face him, to look at him or smell his breath. But sometimes, in the corner of his vision, he saw her eyes dart to the window and back.)


	17. "Alibi"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not in a great mood, so you get more Jean angst. 
> 
> CW for addiction, trust issues and general bitterness I guess?

He says he’s doing better. Jean isn’t fooled. Harry use sobriety like a flimsy alibi. Put on just enough of a show that when he inevitably gives up, no one can say he didn’t try. 

Jean will, though. He knows the truth. He’s heard it from Harry’s own lips, though between the two of them only Jean remembers:

_“I don’t want to get better. I want to get worse.”_

So he grits his teeth and swallows the hope that rises in him like bile whenever Harry tries that earnest act on him. He’s seen this show too many times before.


	18. "Agnosthesia"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A friend introduced me to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, where today's prompt came from:  
> https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/621470302254317568/agnosthesia
> 
> I think given my penchant for angst I'll be using this resource a lot.

It occurs to Harry that he has no idea how he feels about Satellite-Officer Jean Vicquemare. 

It’s not the amnesia. For most people, even when he searches for their name or how he knows them and finds nothing, he still gets a flash of something.

Then by chance, he catches a look at his reflection in the rear-view mirror. He glances at Jean, sitting with his eyes fixed on the road. He considers his own expression, as he would with a witness or suspect. 

How does _this_ man feel about _that_ man?

The answer is blindingly obvious:

“Regret.”


	19. "Artist"

When he said where he was taking her, Dora almost laughed. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from a date with the Jamrock gym teacher with the disco-ball smile. 

Not the  _ Musée d’Art Moderne _ in Revachol East, that was certain. 

And true, the sight of him perusing the gallery in his leather jacket and flares was more paradoxical than any of the abstract pieces on display. Yet she soon realised he hadn’t picked it arbitrarily from some list of Places to Take a Middle Class Girl. He was, as much as her fellow students with their portfolios, an artist.


	20. "Decision"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This came out of me struggling to make myself write, so Jake_the_space_cat suggested I write about executive dysfunction from a character's POV. So I did :)

“Kim?”

“Yes?”

“Do you decide what to do and then just… do it?”

Kim paused and his eyes drifted to the side, the way he always did when Harry asked about something so obvious he hadn’t stopped to consider it.

“Yes. As a rule.”

“And other people?”

“I haven’t asked. But I suppose they do, too.”

Harry nodded, brows hanging over his eyes in contemplation.

“I don’t do that,” he replied after chewing it over, “I decide what to do. And then I wait to see if I do it.”

“Ah,” Kim replied, “That would explain a great deal, detective.”


	21. "Running on Empty"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: References to drug use, unhealthy eating habits
> 
> This will be a flashback in a longer fic I'm working on, but I realised it worked as a stand-alone drabble as well.

Darkness. Shapes pulsing behind his eyelids. Head resting on his forearms, slumped over a table. Heart quivering in his chest, legs shaking. Voices drifting in through the miasma, blurred together. 

Then, one speaking above the rest:

“Give him some air. I’ve got this.”

Familiar. The same chain-smoker’s rasp as his own.

A door clicking shut. Someone pulling out a chair and sitting down. A sigh.

“Alright, Shitkid.” The same voice. Wearier this time. “When did you last put something in your body that wasn’t booze or cigarette smoke?” 

Then, clearly seeing the loophole coming:

“Or speed, for fuck’s sake.”


	22. "Torch"

The torch is solid in his hands. It feels good. Like it could be a weapon. Like if, hypothetically, some supranatural creature were to come screaming around the corner, he could hit it. With the torch.

Not that he’s afraid of the dark. Harry doesn’t remember his own address, but he knows on a deep, ingrained level, that grown men are not afraid of the dark. Kim’s not afraid.

He glances back over his shoulder. To check if Kim’s still there.

At the edge of the cone of light, something moves. Harry swings the torch around.

(He  _ doesn’t  _ squeal. That noise came from something else.)


	23. "Uniform"

The uniform feels odd. Harry’s never worn one before. The closest he got was the tracksuits he wore for teaching gym, but those had still been ones he’d picked out himself.

The kids hadn’t been in uniforms either. Uniforms were for the rich kids over in Ozonne schools. Jamrock kids wore a mishmash of hand-me-down boxer shorts, oversized t-shirts with faded logos, and trainers with holes in the toes. No one expected anything from those kids. Nor from him.

He buttons and unbuttons the jacket. Tries to decide whether to tuck in his shirt.

Then Dora adjusts his tie.

“You look great, darling.”


	24. "Rope"

From her dock, Joyce mulls over what she said to her superior before leaving for Martinaise:

“I’ll be sure to give the Claires just enough rope to hang themselves.”

Sometimes she wonders if she has some peculiar, sideways power of prophecy. Pale irradiation will do that to you. You find connections where none exist. You become so entangled in the web of threads stretching from past to present that you start to imagine you can see the future too.

Of course, the Claires aren’t the ones hanging from the tree. And as many strings as she has grasped in her fingers, she can’t quite snag either of them.


	25. "Orbit"

Sometimes Joyce tries to imagine what it will look like, when the satellites finally reach low-orbit and the first images of the world are spat out of some radiocomputer. Oh they’ll be pale (ha!) reflections of the real thing of course, rendered in ink and paper. But still…

Will the world look like a crystal goblet, dropped and shattered, Pale leaking out from the cracks like wine? Or perhaps the assessment that bubbled up from the encephalopathy-wracked mind of that poor burned-out detective was closest, and the world is like an enormous disco ball.

Or perhaps it looks like an egg, just about to hatch.


	26. "Sordid"

If Lieutenant Kitsuragi hadn’t corroborated Harry’s account of the old communard’s confession, Jean wouldn’t have believed it. It sounded… well, it sounded like exactly the kind of crazy hypothetical Harry would come up with.

He could picture it. Him, sat at his desk trying to get paperwork done. Harry marching into the room, that grin on his face that foreshadowed the nonsense to come.

“Hey Jean?” he’d say.

“What?” he’d reply.

“You reckon a sniper could hit a guy mid-coitus?”

He’d try not to get drawn in as Harry added more and more sordid details. He’d fail, of course.


	27. "Illegal"

“Kim?”

“Yes, detective?”

“I have some questions about the law.”

“Really? I thought your memory of that was fairly intact?”

“Oh, yeah. I remember what’s illegal. I just… I’m not always sure  _ why _ .”

“Ah. Well, I’m a cop not a lawyer. But if I can answer then I will.”

“Okay. Dros shooting Kortenaer. That was murder. I understand that.”

“Yes.”

“But when the mercenaries shot Glen, and Angus, and Theo… it wasn’t?”

“…no. I believe their deaths were classed as ‘collateral damage’.”

“But… why?”

“Detective, I—”

“Why isn’t it murder?”

“…I think perhaps it’s better not to dwell on that.”


	28. "Folklore"

“Ever heard of the rusalka of Revachol bay?”

The children sat at the old washerwoman’s feet shook their heads, eyes wide with anticipation. When Kim glanced at Harry, he discovered he was doing the same.

“Many years ago,” the old woman began, with sing-song cadence of the storyteller, “an evil man lured a young woman to the bay’s edge. There, he drowned her beneath the ice—”

“How many years?”

The washerwoman blinked.

“That’s not important.”

Before Harry could ask another question, Kim reached out and touched his arm.

“This is folklore,” he whispered, “We don’t need to investigate it.”


	29. "Unusual"

In some ways, Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor du Bois was not unusual. Dr Gottlieb had seen his fair share of addict cops over the years. On days bad enough to require such jokes, he’d say that the RCM pension fund was kept afloat by those recipients who were helpful enough to drink themselves into early graves.

In his experience, they came in two flavours. There were the functional addicts, the ones who’d meet their obligations for years while slowly poisoning themselves in private. Then there were the disasters, the ones who started spiralling and wouldn’t stop until they died or were fired.

The functional addicts were easier to handle, but needed handling for longer. The disasters were a pain in his ass, but had the virtue of burning out quicker.

If Harry was exceptional, it was in his ability to embody both the extravagant nihilism of the latter and the unrelenting longevity of the former. Every time he seemed to have reached the bottom of his personal spiral he’d find a way to descend further, like some kind of self-destruction barber’s pole.

In short, he was the biggest pain in the ass Gottlieb had ever had the misfortune to treat.


	30. "Assess"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't mind me I'm just trying to figure out how to get Trant's voice across in text. Right now I'm mostly just throwing italics in where they don't belong.

“You’re not a cop?”

“I’m a special consultant.” He answers cheerily and precisely, as though reading from a familiar script. “I lend my _expertise_ to the RCM as needed.”

You get the sense ‘as needed’ is quite often. This man is good at knowing why people do things. Maybe he can help you understand why  _ you _ do the things you do?

“You’re here to be an expert on me?”

“I’m here to assess you. I wouldn’t say I’m an expert on _you_ , but Lieutenant Vicquemare _believed_ I may have some _insight_ on your behaviour, mental state, et _cetera_.”

“But you know me?”

“We’ve worked together before.”

(Don’t say ‘Are you angry with me too?’ Find a way to ask it indirectly.)

“Do you know me as well as Jean does?”

Trant tilts his head, thinking.

“No, I wouldn’t say that. You and Vicquemare have been _partners_ for four years. That tends to produce, if not _require_ , a bond that _transcends_ that between mere colleagues.” 

A phrase bubbles up from your brain.

“A…. battle-tested relationshit?”

His constant smile falters in confusion.

“You mean ‘relationship’, officer?”

“Khm. Yes.”

“Aha!” The smile flicks back on. “Yes, that seems a  _ very  _ fitting description.”


End file.
